What Is Ansible ?
Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s main goals are simplicity and ease-of-use. It also has a strong focus on security and reliability, featuring a minimum of moving parts, usage of OpenSSH for transport (with other transports and pull modes as alternatives), and a language that is designed around auditability by humans–even those not familiar with the program.
Ansible manages machines in an agent-less manner. There is never a question of how to upgrade remote daemons or the problem of not being able to manage systems because daemons are uninstalled. Because OpenSSH is one of the most peer-reviewed open source components, security exposure is greatly reduced. Ansible is decentralized–it relies on your existing OS credentials to control access to remote machines. If needed, Ansible can easily connect with Kerberos, LDAP, and other centralized authentication management systems.
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.
Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.
ANSIBLE ARCHITECTURE
Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out small programs, called “Ansible modules” to them. These programs are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules (over SSH by default), and removes them when finished.
Your library of modules can reside on any machine, and there are no servers, daemons, or databases required. Typically you’ll work with your favorite terminal program, a text editor, and probably a version control system to keep track of changes to your content.
INVENTORY IN SIMPLE TEXT FILES
To add new machines, there is no additional SSL signing server involved, so there’s never any hassle deciding why a particular machine didn’t get linked up due to obscure NTP or DNS issues.
Once inventory hosts are listed, variables can be assigned to them in simple text files (in a subdirectory called ‘group_vars/’ or ‘host_vars/’) or directly in the inventory file.
ANSIBLE FOR AD HOC PARALLEL TASK EXECUTION
Once you have an instance available, you can talk to it right away, without any additional setup:
ansible all -m ping
ansible all -m package -a “name=httpd state=installed”
ansible all -a “/usr/sbin/reboot”
ANSIBLE PLAYBOOKS
Playbooks can finely orchestrate multiple slices of your infrastructure topology, with very detailed control over how many machines to tackle at a time. This is where Ansible starts to get most interesting.
ANSIBLE: MODULES, PLUGINS and API
Ansible modules can be written in any language that can return JSON (Ruby, Python, bash, etc). Inventory can also plug in to any datasource by writing a program that speaks to that datasource and returns JSON. There’s also various Python APIs for extending Ansible’s connection types (SSH is not the only transport possible), callbacks (how Ansible logs, etc), and even for adding new server side behaviors.
Every business is a digital business. Technology is your innovation engine, and delivering your applications faster helps you win. Historically, that required a lot of manual effort and complicated coordination. But today, there is Ansible — the simple, yet powerful IT automation engine that thousands of companies are using to drive complexity out of their environments and accelerate DevOps initiatives.
Let’s see how ansible is helping Industries for Solving Challenges :-
NASA and Ansible
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation’s civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE :- NASA needed to move roughly 65 applications from a traditional hardware based data center to a cloud-based environment for better agility and cost savings. The rapid timeline resulted in many applications being migrated ‘as-is’ to a cloud environment.
This created an environment spanning multiple virtual private clouds (VPCs) and AWS accounts that could not be easily managed. Even simple things, like ensuring every system administrator had access to every server, or simple patching, were extremely burdensome.
SOLUTIONS :- Leverage Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment
RESULTS :- As a result of implementing Ansible Tower, NASA is better equipped to manage its AWS environment. Tower allowed NASA to provide better operations and security to its clients. It has also increased efficiency as a team.
By the numbers:
• Updating nasa.gov went from over 1 hour to under 5 minutes
• Patching updates went from a multi-day process to 45 minutes
• Achieving near real-time RAM and disk monitoring (accomplished without agents)
• Provisioning OS Accounts across entire environment in under 10 minutes
• Baselining standard AMIs went from 1 hour of manual configuration to becoming an invisible and seamless background process
• Application stack set up from 1–2 hours to under 10 minutes per stack
“Ansible Tower has allowed us to provide better operations and security to our clients. It has also increased our efficiency as a team.” -NASA
SUCCESS STORY OF BMW
The BMW Group needs to access, analyze, and apply large amounts of data collected from sensors used during road tests to support its automated vehicle initiatives. Created by DXC Technology using Red Hat software, the BMW Group’s new data platform helped the group reduce development time with faster, more accurate driving simulations and data analytics.
CHALLENGE :- Worldwide, car manufacturers are focused on introducing automated vehicles, which require hundreds of millions of miles of driving data to prove their safety. To develop the driving algorithms for its automated vehicle initiatives, the BMW Group needed to access, analyze, and apply massive quantities of data — and update its driving applications with new algorithms as they are developed. The group wanted to create a high-performance, data-driven development platform as the IT foundation of its autonomous vehicle efforts.
SOLUTION :- The BMW Group chose to work with DXC Technology to build a solution for its data and performance challenges. To create a Kubernetes-based platform with robust automation capabilities, DXC Technology deployed DXC Robotic Drive, a managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) based on Red Hat OpenShift and other Red Hat technology. This solution helps the BMW Group develop faster with scalable machine learning and big data processing capabilities. The platform was configured and created in just 3 months.
BUSINESS OUTCOME :- By automating repeatable tasks and providing self-service capabilities, the BMW Group significantly reduced development time and improved developer productivity. The platform also provides massively scalable data collection, processing, and storage capabilities. It offers close to 230 PB of usable storage and the compute power to simulate up to 240 million kilometers of test data. In addition, the BMW Group created a vendor-neutral environment for collaboration with partners and other automotive manufacturers to advance innovation.
“Without this solution, achieving the right level of analysis and efficiency would take literally millions of years of effort. Red Hat OpenShift makes the deployment of new applications as easy as possible for the entire DevOps team.”
- Dr. Jochen Thaeder
Conclusion
Red Hat Ansible helps organizations scale IT automation, manage complex deployments, and govern automation. It allows users to centralize and control their IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, playbooks, and analytics to reduce operational complexity.
Thank you !
Credits :- Vimal Daga Sir, Google, Ansible….
